Miley, Wait!
by sunlight splash
Summary: No one told me that my life was about to change, though. They didn’t tell me about paparazzi and magazine editors and publicists and the lawyer my parents would have to hire." A Miley Stewart/Nick Jonas story. NILEY! Eat it. :D
1. Break Up Song

**Based off of 'Audrey, Wait!' I'm just using Miley, Lilly, Oliver, Amber, Jake, and Nick Jonas' names and making it more like their personalities. And this takes place about 3 years later than present day and Nick Jonas is not famous. I own nothing. Enjoy! And it's rated T for a reason.**

The day I broke up with my boyfriend Jake was the day he wrote the song. You know, _the_ song. I'm sure you've heard it. Maybe you've danced to it at prom or sang it in your car on a Friday night when you were driving and feeling like you must be inhuman to feel this happy, the windows down and nothing but air around you. Your mom has probably hummed it while cleaning the dyers' lint trap, and your grandpa has most likely whistled a few bars. If he's the whistling type.

According to the poll on the front page of _USA Today_, sixty-three percent of Americans blame me for the breakup, so let me clear the air now: They're right. Sixty-three percent of Americans are no fools when it comes to knowing about my love life, a fact that is really creepy and isn't helping me sleep well. But it's true: I broke up with Jake, and eight hours later, he had a song in his head and a guitar in his hand and it snowballed from there.

It took me forever to decide whether or not to break up with him, I can tell you that. It wasn't like I just woke up one morning and was like, "Hey, let's liven thing up!" Please. I have enough on my plate without all this. I'm a junior, for God's sakes! It's not like I have to take the SATs this year or anything. But I had been thinking about it—breaking up—for a while.

"Make a list," Lilly had suggested. She's big on lists and has a folder full of them. They have titles like "Six Colors to Dye My Hair Before I Shrivel Up and Die" and "Five People to Banish From the Face of the Earth" (Jake, according to her, is now _numero uno_). So the day I did it, I sat at Lilly's kitchen table and wrote down the reasons why I should stay with Jake.

1. He's a singer/songwriter with a band and actual talent.

2. He has excellent oral hygiene. (That one is so important, I can't even tell you. I can't imagine ever kissing a non-flosser. So gross).

3. He says he's going to write a song about me.

And then I wrote the cons:

1. He smokes too much pot.

2. He's always "practicing" or "gigging" with his band, the Do-Gooders, especially when I need him.

3. He says "gigging".

4. He's mellow about everything. _Everything._

5. He makes me be the one to get the condoms from the school nurse's office.

6. He sucks his teeth after he eats, which makes horrible squeaking sounds, like a mouse is dying.

And so on. I wrote so many cons that I needed a new piece of paper, and by the time Lilly saw me start a fresh page, she took it away and shook her head. "Miley," She told me, "save a tree."

"Well, can we still be...I don't know, friends? Or something lame like that?" Jake had been cross-legged on his bed when I broke up with him. I was on the opposite side of the room in his desk chair, sitting backwards. We were both crying, but he was the only one who needed tissues. Still, we passed the box back and forth.

"Friends would be great." I said, and relief flooded through me. Friends were bloody fantastic, friends were not angry at each other. Friends still talked. Friends drifted apart. "I'd really like being friends."

He fell on his bed for a minute before sitting back up. "Steve finally got the A&R guy to come to a show of ours. He set up a one-off tonight. You're really killing my vibe."

"I'm sorry." I said, and I meant it. I really did.  
"Will you still come?"  
"If you want me to, sure." _Anything to make this conversation end_, I thought.

Jake nodded and hugged his guitar tighter to him, and I have to admit that even in the eleven months we were together, that guitar practically got more action than I did. (Reason number fourteen on the list of cons, by the way). "You sure you want to do this?"

"Yeah," I whispered. "I'm sure."

We didn't talk for a few minutes, and then I got up and said, "I'm going now." When he didn't respond, I left the room and was halfway down the stairs before I heard him say, "Miley, wait!" But I kept going, pretending I didn't hear him calling for me.

That night, I enlisted Lilly and her boyfriend, Oliver, to come with me to the show for moral support. "Like I wasn't already going?" Lilly said when I asked her. "I've already gotten about fifty million texts and thirty million Facebook bulletins about it. And besides," she added, "I want details."

During the drive over to the Jukebox in Oliver's car (he has an awesome sound system with a subwoofer), she made me recount the breakup word for word, with Oliver wincing every few minutes.

"Harsh, man," He kept saying. "That is so _harsh_." Lilly finally whacked him on the shoulder. "Can you please be more sensitive to Miley's situation?" she hissed.

"Sorry, Miley." Oliver smiled at me in the rearview mirror. "Sensitivity controls now engaged."  
"And could you not sound like a dork when you do it?"  
"It's one or the other, babe."  
"Don't worry about it, Oliver." I told him. "It's all good."  
Lilly just shook her head and hung over the backseat. "Either way," she said, "I cannot believe you agreed to go tonight."

Half an hour later, packed like sardines inside the Jukebox, we were still talking about it. "Did Jake actually say 'kill his vibe'?" Lilly asked. By now, she was on her third Diet Coke and I could see the caffeine starting to shoot out of her eyes.

I crossed my arms in front of me and stood by the side of the stage, hoping the Do-Gooders would hurry up and play so we could go home and skip the traffic. "Those words exactly." I told her. "Plus some other choice phrases."

"What? Like, 'Fuck you'?"  
"No, more like, 'How could you do this to me?' 'I thought we were gonna be together forever.' That kind of stuff." I stirred my melted ice with my straw.

Lilly rolled her eyes in solidarity. "Please. He must be a closet romantic novel reader. I'm surprised he didn't break out a lute and try to woo you."

"If he had done that, I would've been more interested." I took her drink from her and sat down. "You're making me nervous with all the addictive stimulants. Don't you know that NutraSweet can give you cancer?"

"So can sunlight." She took her drink back and made a big deal of slurping the rest with her straw. "I hope Oliver's getting me another one of these."

"I hope he's getting you a side of tranquilizers." I looked over my shoulder and saw a third of our class standing behind us. No one seemed too interested in me. Yet. "Do you think people know we broke up?"  
"Have you told anyone besides me and Oliver?"  
"Nope. But Jake might have."  
"You've totally ruined the poll that people had going for Cutest Couple in the yearbook, by the way. Not to guilt you out or anything."  
"What?"  
"Not me, I mean. _I _saw this one coming a long time ago. But people were laying two-to-one bets that you and Jake would be Cutest Couple."  
"People are betting on yearbook superlatives? Really?"

Lilly nodded. "Now the smart money is on Dan Milne and Janie Cooper. She's worse than static cling."

I was about to comment on Janie Cooper's static-clinginess, but then I saw Amber across the room. Even if you've never met Amber, you know her. Every school, I'm sorry to say, has a girl like her. She's pretty or hot or whatever word you want to use, and she has this weird ability to make every guy worship her. Every guy, that is, except Jake.

"What are you looking at?" Lilly asked, craning her neck to see, but luckily Oliver elbowed his way back to me and Lilly with her Diet Coke and my cranberry juice with lime. "See now, Jake wouldn't have done this." Lilly pointed out as she took her drink. "He wouldn't have noticed that you were thirsty, much less that I was. I mean, you could both be walking in the goddamn Sahara desert and you'd be dying of thirst and he'd be all like, 'Hey Miley, I've got this killer idea for a song.' Totally useless."

I swirled my ice with the straw. "Jake used 'killer' last year. This year, everything is 'fool-ass'."  
"Okay, Miley? Let me introduce you to something called The Point. You're missing it."

She was on a roll now. "I'm just saying that you've been really patient with Jake. More patient than I would've been—"  
Oliver snorted and then became really interested in his drink.

"—and I think you just deserve someone who makes you feel special and wonderful and all those good things that you see on TV."  
"I thought you weren't watching TV anymore."

Lilly shrugged. "I fell off the wagon."  
If you ever meet Lilly, don't call her Lil, Lils, Lillian, or anything other than Lilly. If you're feeling both immortal and bored, though, call her Lilly Willy.

On-stage, Jon, the Do-Gooders' drummer, started to do a half-hearted sound check. If there is a hell, there will be a drummer sound-checking there, I guarantee you. "Oh, God, kill me now." Lilly rolled her eyes again.

"I'm a weak, spineless girl, what can I say?" I was quickly downing my cranberry juice and wishing it had a kick to it.  
"Plus, the A&R guy's here and Steve kept promising that he would come and I want to see him in person."

A quick word on Steve: Three months ago, the Do-Gooders played a show at the Jukebox, the one where part of the ceiling caved in during their set and it knocked out their amps and they kept playing away.  
Anyway, Steve was at the show that night. Steve was a freshman at UCLA who smoked tons of weed, went to class occasionally, downloaded MP3s, and had an uncle who knew someone who did A&R at a record label. Steve thought the Do-Gooders were "a-may-zing, dude, fucking a-may-zing!" and after the ceiling collapse and the amps gave out, they all went and hung out at Steve's dorm room and agreed to let Steve manage them. As far as I can tell, though, getting the A&R guy to come to the show was the first managerial thing Steve had done for them.

I was about to say something to Lilly about how weird it was being out here rather than backstage before a show, when she grabbed my arm. "Space!" She cried, and shoved me about six feet toward the speaker.

If you really want to know something about me, you should know this: I like my music loud. I mean _loud_. I'm not talking the kind of loud where your parents knock on your bedroom door and ask you to turn it down. Please, that's amateur hour. When I say loud, I mean you-can't-hear-your-parents-knocking-and-the-neighboors-are-putting-a-FOR SALE-sign-on-their-house-and-moving-to-another-block-because-they-can't-handle-the-constant-noise-anymore _loud_. If you aren't this kind of person, then I don't think we'll get along.

Lilly and I always turn things up for ten. In fact, it's getting to be a problem because we've already blown out the speakers in my car. Twice. The first time, my parents took pity on me and replaced them, but now I have to dig up the cash to fix it. So Lilly and I usually use Oliver for his car, ow we just ride in mine and sing really loud until we laugh so hard, we want to throw up, and Oliver ducks in the backseat and pulls his hoodie tighter around his head and looks like he wants to _die_.

The lights finally went out and the crowd started whistling and clapping. Next to me, Lilly was grinning and wiggling around. She lives for this moment at shows, when the lights are cut and all you can see is the dim outline of a stage and empty mikes waiting to be picked up and abused. When the Do-Gooders came out, shaggy and skinny with their heads down, the applause got even louder. Even I let out a few whistles.

"Here comes trouble." Oliver muttered behind me when Jake came out, and I could see Lilly plow her elbow into his ribs from the corner of my eye.

My resolve took a little nosedive when I saw Jake. God, he was cute. Not even cute: hot. H-A-W-T, hot. His hair was shining under the stage lights and he was wearing his beat-up shoes, the ones that looked horrible and smelled even worse. I could see him looking out at the crowd and I didn't know if I was supposed to make eye contact with him or smile or pretend I couldn't see him.

Was Jake looking for me, though? His eyes scanned across stage left and never stopped, and I didn't wave. Next to me, Lilly reached down and squeezed my hand twice. Seriously, I love her.

"Hi, we're the Do-Gooders," Jake said into the mic, and you could hear some girls giggle and swoon. I had never been jealous of them before, but now I felt a small twist in my stomach. _Just get this over with_, I begged silently. "The name's ironic." Ha ha, hee hee,. Oh, Jake, you're a riot. Please. Stop. My sides.

They played through six songs and the crowd danced and sweated on each other and the bass shook the floors under our feet and the roof over our heads. The Jukebox was approximately the size of my parents' kitchen and the walls would get slick from the humidity of too many people too close together. Onstage, Jake kept shaking his head back and forth in time with the music, his hair pinwheeling and sending little blue drops of sweat toward Bob, the rhythm guitarist, and Daniel, their bassist.

Here's something you don't know about Jake: He used to practice that move in front of the mirror. I'm just saying.

Jake's voice pulled me back to the stage. "This is usually the point where we go backstage and you clap and we do our encore, but we're gonna skip that middle part tonight and get straight to the music."

_One more song_, I told myself. _One more song and then I can go to the In-N-Out drive-thru with Lilly and Oliver and get a grilled cheese and a chocolate shake and blast music until my ears want to fall off and Oliver takes me home. One more song and then I can be a normal, average girl without a boyfriend._"This is a new song for us; I wrote it tonight."

A new song? Everyone in the crowd was talking a little. The Do-Gooders hadn't written a new song in at least four months, and we already knew all the words to their stuff. But a new song? This wasn't in my grilled-cheese-and-loud-music plan.

Lilly, I should point out here, is very smart. Sometimes she is smarter than me. "Uh-oh." I heard her say, but before I could turn my head to see what "uh-oh" was about, Jake kept speaking.

"My girlfriend Miley broke up with me today and—"  
_Uh-oh._

You know how in the movies, the room will be really crowded and noisy and someone will say something that causes everyone's heads to whip around and stare at the person? Let me tell you something: That happens in real life, too. And it happened to me when Jake said that. Two hundred people in the room, four hundred eyes (actually 399; Jake Myers lost one in a fishing accident when he was nine), and all of them were burning into me.

Jake hadn't shut up yet. "Yeah, she broke up with me right before the biggest night of my life—"  
"_Harsh_," whispered a voice behind me. Guess who.  
"And I always said I'd write a song about her and, well, I hope it's not too late. This on is called 'Miley, Wait!'"

Have you ever had a brain freeze? That's what it felt like when I heard the title of the song. I remembered walking down Jake's staircase, pretending I didn't hear him. I had made a huge mistake. I hadn't listened to him, so he was making sure I was listening now.

(Okay, so I also have to admit, I was a little disappointed the song wasn't titled "Miley, the Hottest Girl I've Ever Met," or "Miley, You're Kisses (Were Amazing)" or something like that.)

It was like nothing they've ever played before. Jake was changing chords so fast and I thought for the briefest moment, _Is that how he loved me? Did he really love me like this? _I began imagining our reconciliation scene, making out after the show and giggling about how stupid I was for breaking up with him and--

He started singing.  
"You said your piece and now I've got to say mine! I had you and you strung me on the liiiiinnnnneeee!"  
_What?_  
"We said we loved and it was a lie! I touched your hair and watched you die! You crucified my heart, took every part, and hung them out to drrrrrryyyyyy!"  
_Oh. My. God._

"'It's all good!' you always say! But save it for another day! 'Cause now I'm watching you walk awaaaaayyyyyy!"

Here's the worst part: The song was good. I mean, you obviously know that by now—I'm not revealing some big secret or anything. But at the time, the whole crowd was having a collective heart attack, they were dancing so hard. Even the kids who don't dance, the ones who refuse to show any emotion about anything but still show up, they were nodding their heads to the beat like they were issuing a mob hit. I could see the A&R guy, tapping his foot and watching the stage, hungry. Steve was completely bug-eyed and gaping; he had no idea this band could produce this song.

Neither had I.

And then the chorus started. Sing along if you want.  
"Miley, wait! Miley, wait! You walked out the door and I want you to see me slam it shut! Miley, wait! Miley, wait! You can say all you want, but I want you to know that this is the cruelest cut!"

I swear, if that song hadn't been about me, if I had never met Jake, I would've been on that stage shaking what my momma gave me, it was that addictive. But instead, I was rooted to the floor and my jaw was somewhere around my knees. Lilly was next to me, her eyes wide, and Oliver was bopping around behind us, a little unaware of how dire the situation was. I mean, Jake was standing on the stage and singing about me in front of our entire school!

If I had been quicker, I would've run up onstage and yanked the wires out of the amp, and while I was at it, body-slammed Jake or knocked over the drum kit or something. But I couldn't move; I couldn't cry or talk. Really, it was like being buried alive, and Jake had the shovel.

I finally turned my head to look at Lilly, who kept glancing from Jake to me. "Holy fuck," her mouth was saying again and again. But even her foot was tapping the floor. She saw me looking and stopped. Why couldn't I have broken up with Jake tomorrow? Why couldn't I be a procrastinator like Lilly?  
I bet he even lied about flossing.

Finally the song ended. "Thank you, we're the Do-Gooders!" Jake shouted, putting his fist in the air as he pulled his guitar off. The rest of the band walked offstage, but Jake? I swear, he _strutted_. Just like a chicken.

"Is this really happening?" I grabbed Lilly's hand and held it in front of me. "Is this a dream? Am I dreaming? Are you dreaming? Are you about to turn into a Cadillac or is a unicorn gonna run through the room?"

"No, you're awake."  
I closed my eyed and then opened then wide. "Could you please just lie to me?"  
Lilly, without taking her eyes off me, pulled on Oliver's sleeve. "Uh, you might want to start leading us out of here sweetie."

"Is Oliver dreaming? Am I in Oliver's dream, maybe?" Oliver was holding on to Lilly's hand, and she had mine, and we were making a little train through the crowd of people.  
"No, you're having a meltdown."  
"Is it a bad thing that I can't feel my feet?"  
"Now you're just being dramatic."  
"Um, excuse me, did you not see what just happened?!"

"Hey, Miley, that was an awesome song!" Kids waved at me as if I'd written The Song. As if I _would_ write it!

"Good thing you broke up with him!"  
"Miley, wait! Miley, wait!" I heard that one every time I took a step.

"I'm going to kill them." I told Lilly.  
"No, you're not." Oliver tugged her to the left and I zigzagged behind them.  
"You're right," I agreed. "I'm not going to kill them. I'm going to kill _Jake_."  
"That would make a fantastic college essay. 'I Killed My Boyfriend and Still Managed to Maintain a 4.2 GPA.'"  
"You would never write a song about me, would you, Lilly?"  
"I wouldn't write a song like _that_ about you, that's for sure."

By the time Oliver got us back to the car, I had pulled my hair over my shoulders so that it hung toward my stomach and hid my face. "Buckle up, Cousin Itt," Oliver said in the rearview mirror.  
"Now would be a good time to engage those sensitivity controls again, Oliver."  
"Got it."

Lilly climbed into the backseat with me and we sat facing each other. "So do I kill myself now, or do I wait and do it in front of Jake so he feels really, _really_ bad?"  
"You're not going to kill yourself. Remember in health class, when they talked about how adolescents drink to mask pain? _That's_ what you're going to do."

"Did they talk about dismembering ex-boyfriends, too?"  
"I don't think we'll get to that until anatomy next year."  
I laughed as the car lurched into traffic. Everyone was looking into our windows and then turning to each other in their cars. I could practically hear what they were saying: "There's the girl that broke up with Jake! Her, right there!"

"Look," Oliver said from the front seat. "Don't worry about this, Miley. It's just some song. It's not like those people weren't gonna find out you broke up, anyway."  
"Listen to the man," Lilly agreed. "He speaks the truth."  
"Damn straight," Oliver said. "He's gonna be so high later that he probably won't remember the lyrics anyway."  
"Amen," Lilly added. "You wanna go to In-N-Out?"

I rested my head against her shoulder and nodded. She knows me so well it's scary. "Yes, but I don't have any cash."  
"Me either. Oliver, Miley and I have no cash."  
"Why aren't I surprised?" he muttered while merging into the intersection.

So while we were in the drive-thru line, while Oliver was yelling our order into the teeny-tiny speaker box, while they were making me a strawberry milkshake instead of a chocolate one I ordered, you probably know what Jake was doing. I mean, he's talked about it in every single interview he's given. The A&R guy came out into the Jukebox loading dock and shook all their hands and said things like "You guys rocked!" and dropped some names of label heads and invited them to the office on Monday morning. "Get ready," he told them. "Your lives are about to change."

No one told me that my life was about to change, though. They didn't tell me about paparazzi and magazine editors and publicists and the lawyer my parents would have to hire. They certainly didn't tell me that all of you people would know my name by the end of the year.  
And that's all you know: my name.  
But not anymore, kiddos.  
Here's my side of the story.

**Long chapter, right? Haha. (:  
And let's pretend that for this story that Miley's mom is still alive. Just play along. Review!**


	2. One Year to the Day

**Nick is going to be introduced shortly. Patience is a virtue. ;)**

Despite the insanity of that show, things calmed down pretty quickly. It's like when something horrible happens to you and you wonder, How will I ever live another minute without freaking out about this? And then a minute goes by without you thinking about it, and then an hour, and pretty soon your life goes back to normal and you can't even remember what had you all upset.

Apparently, everyone else at that night's shoe had the same reaction, too; Jake's song died down by the time school started, thank God. People weren't even talking about it on the first day, because Sarah threw up in the girl's bathroom three times before lunch, and people were convinced she was either pregnant or bulimic. Either way, it was exciting, and now when people said, "Miley, wait!" in the hallway, they meant just that. No irony required. (Oh, and it turns out Sarah just had some bad sushi the night before.)

Jake and the Do-Gooders never showed up to start their senior year, and I heard a bunch of rumors about that. No one said anything to me directly, since Lilly had made it clear that Jake was _persona non grata_ in out little world, but still, you know how rumors are. They slip around corner and slide under doors. Someone said that he and the band had dropped our of school and moved to Japan to record their first CD, and they were already famous there. Others said that the A&R guy had signed them that night, then dropped them on Monday morning after his free drinks wore off and he came to his senses.

But the prevailing view was that the band had dropped out of school and were being tutored at home so they could rehearse more. I was curious, I admit, but mostly just relieved that I didn't have to see Jake in the halls everyday. It's like every breaker-upper's dream that the other person will just magically disappear so you never have to have an awkward moment with them, and except for that one night and that one song, Jake was gone.  
(Confession time: I did Google the Do-Gooders a couple of times, but nothing new came up besides their outdated Myspace page that Lilly had helped them create.)

Anyway, I managed to survive the first few months of school with a minimum amount of drama (save for a stupid computer that managed to delete my entire paper on _Death of a Salesman_ the night before it was due).

Then the Saturday before Halloween, Lilly came over for two reasons: (1) I was gonna help her dye her hair hot pink. Not the whole head, just a landing strip down the middle of her scalp so it would look like she had a Mohawk. Lilly is brave and awesome and all of that, but shaving part of her head held no appeal for her. Hair dye would have to suffice.

And (2) it was a year to the day that I had first talked to Jake at Charles Hurty's Halloween party. I know Jake likes to explain it in interviews. Everyone and their mother likes to mention it to me when he talks about me in public, which is just wonderful. Like I don't know what happened in our relationship? But yeah, Jake likes to tell this part:  
"We were at a Halloween party. She was standing there in front of me and our eyes met and it was like...wow."

Sweet, right? So ideal and romantic and exactly what a million girls are secretly hoping will happen to them one day when they're the lucky ones to meet Jake. All I can say is this: Bring Handi Wipes.

Our eyes met as he bent over to puke foamy keg beet on the boots that perfectly matched my go-go dancer costume. _That's_ how it happened. And Lilly will never get over the fact that the boots were ruined. "They were _vintage_!" she moaned for six months afterward.

My dad was carving a pumpkin when I came downstairs to wait for Lilly, nearly tripping over my cat, Bendomolena, and killing myself. I guess you could day that Bendy is a cat, but she's not so much a cat as a hair ball the size of a suitcase. I'm not kidding. The mailman is terrified of her, which is so ridiculous because (a) she's not a pit bull; (b) she weighs approximately twenty thousand pounds (Bendomolena couldn't lunge for his ankles even if she wanted to); and (c) she's scared of everything that didn't originate in our house. One time Lilly brought her pet hamster Charles (the last in a long line of hamsters) over to run around in his little plastic ball, and oh my Lord. I don't want to go into details, but let's just say that Bendy had to temporarily go on anti-anxiety medication and Charles the Hamster refused to set paw outside his plastic ball ever again.

"Bendy, away from the stairs!" my dad yelled as I managed to catch myself before falling to my death.  
"Did you want her to move any time soon?" I asked. "Because it probably won't happen until Christmas."  
"Ha ha, Miss Comedy." He looked up from the pumpkin he was carving and straightened his glasses. "Nice shoes."

"You think?" I did a little twirl in my flamingo slippers. They were so big that I had to waddle everywhere. Just like Bendomolena.

"They're stylin'."  
"Dad, if you never say 'stylin'' again, it'll be too soon."  
"Can I say things are cool?"  
"Not around me, please."  
"That's cool."  
I sighed. "Where's mom?"  
"Out buying candy for when the neighborhood kids come begging tomorrow night."

"Um, she left you alone with the pumpkin?" My dad, well-meaning as he is, has almost been forced to retire from pumpkin carving, thanks to the dramatic and colorful Massive Blood Loss Incident of Halloween Three Years Ago. Let's just say one should never carve a pumpkin while watching the Steelers lose.

As an answer, I got the Dad look.  
"I only ask because I care," I told him. "How are we on Band-Aids?"  
"Isn't Lilly coming over?" _Stab-stab-stab, slice._

"Any minute." I sat down at the table and watched for signs of blood. "Y'know, I can make a tourniquet using a shoelace. I learned how to in Girl Scouts."  
"I thought you dropped out of Girl Scouts."  
"Not before the lesson on first aid. Besides, the uniforms were itchy."  
"Of course they were. How's the pumpkin?" He turned it so I could see its triangle eyes and nose and crooked mouth. He's a traditionalist like that. "Does it look even?"  
"It's just gonna get smashed on the street like every year," I said as I ate some pumpkin seed off the cookie sheet.  
"Humor me, Mils."  
"Best pumpkin ever!"

"Your lack of faith is distracting," my dad pointed out.  
I eyed the pumpkin, which had a few unintentional gashed where its ears should have been. "Believe me dad, I can tell."

Lilly let herself in and came into the kitchen just as my dad accidentally shaved off of the pumpkin's teeth. "Hey, I thought your dad wasn't allowed to carve pumpkins anymore."  
My dad pushed up his glasses back up to his nose. "Hi, Lilly."  
"Hi, Mr. Stewart." My parents have asked Lilly a billion jillion times to call them by their first names, but she says it would feel too weird. "Still got all ten fingers?"

I waved the phone in her face by way of greeting. "Did you bring it?"  
She pulled the bottle of Marvelous Magenta out of her bag. "Ready and waiting for you, my dear."

"Dad, I'm going upstairs so we can dye Lilly's hair. If anything happens, just remember to raise the cut above the heart, okay?"  
Victoria was peering around my shoulder. "Does that pumpkin have _ears_?"

"Battle wounds," I told her.  
"Oh. Pretty hard-core, Mr. Stewart. I like that." But my dad was too busy trying to fix the pumpkin's now toothless grin to respond, so I grabbed her arm and pushed her towards the stairs. "Goodbye," I told my dad. "We're going far, far away from here."  
"Take Bendomolena with you," he said as he trooped up the stairs, stepping over my land mass of a cat.

I love my room. Lilly loves my room, too, but she'll never admit it. My parents don't exactly love it, but they've decided to accept it's fate as eternally messy. Well, not so much messy as busy. I have a very _busy_ room. CDs are in every corner and on every surface, and there's a bunch of cut-up magazines all over the floor, where I put them after hacking them up and making collages of all my favorite bands. I can do whatever I want in here, and sometimes in the middle of the night and it feels like no one else in the world is awake but me and I'm cutting up another picture and an amazing song comes on the radio, I could die happy.

Jake always said that my room creeped him out, that the walls were watching him or something. That's so like him to think that everything's watching him, waiting to see what he'll do next. What an egomaniac. I hate him.

Lilly said she hated him too. "So...I believe it's officially been a year to the day since you met Fuckhead?"  
I sighed. "You're the most indelicate person I've ever met."  
"You mean except for the guy who _ruined_ those beautiful _vintage_ boots—" she still wasn't over it—"and wrote a mean song about you?"

"The Song Which We Must Not Speak," I reminded her. "The Song That Will Die an Obscure Death and That No One Will Ever Hear Again."  
"Of course. So are you gonna burn anything in effigy to commemorate the day that Jake puked on your boots? A Ken doll? Anything?"

I put on the gross latex gloves that came with the hair dye and shook the bottle. "Nope. I have to work. You know that."

Okay, I've been trying to avoid this part, but it's not a secret anymore. It's true. I work at an ice cream shop—excuse me, _shoppe_—at the mall. That in itself is not so bad except for three things; (1) I hate the mall; (2) I hate all the customers and; (3) I'm forced to wear a bright pink hat and T-shirt that say...are you ready for this?

Scooper Dooper.

If there is any justice in the world, the first major meteorite to ever strike Earth with score a direct hit on the Scooper Dooper. I might even become an astrophysicist just to help move this plan along. But until then, CDs and concert tickets and gasoline aren't cheap, and my parents are into that whole "earn it!" mentality, so I work.

My job the most suck that has ever sucked.

"Maybe you could burn the Scooper Dooper and pretend it's Evan," Lilly offered.  
"That would require a lot more planning than I have energy for," I said. "Tilt your head back."

She did. "I can see up your nose."  
"Ew, gross! Stop looking!"  
She squeezed her eyes shut and giggled. "Oliver and I are gonna go see _The Exorcist_ downtown. You should blow off work and come with us."

"Nah, I don't like paying money to watch head spins. Or to be the third wheel."  
"Shut up, you're not the third wheel."  
"If you and Oliver were a school dance, I'd be the parental chaperone"  
"Yeah, except for the fact that you let us make out in front of you."  
"Which is great fun for me."

She opened her eyes. "Do we make you uncomfortable?"

_Kinda. I don't know. Maybe just lonely. _"No, it's cool. Besides, someone has to be there in case one of you swallows the other one."

Lilly started to laugh. "Rest assured that there had never been, nor will there ever be, swallowing. _Ever_."

"Oh, Jesus Christ, Lilly!" I cried. "So many details that I don't need!" I tried to cover my ears but my gloved hands were still covered in Marvelous Magenta.  
"You love it—you know you do." She was still laughing.

Have you ever been through a breakup while your best friend is, like, practically engaged to the guy she says she's gonna marry? It's awkward. I mean, on the one hand I love Lilly and Oliver to pieces and I'm excited to be a bridesmaid and buy little kid-sized drum sets for their sure-to-be-adorable babies, but on the other hand...  
There's no nice way to say this: It blows like hurricane season.

"We need to get you a date," She decided after calming down. "You need to go up to someone in the hallway and make out with them on Monday."  
"Oh yes, because the options are limitless in our school. I don't know why it didn't occur to me sooner."  
"Hey, school is where I met Oliver!" she protested.  
"One out of fifteen hundred. What fantastic odds."

Lilly settled back in her chair and I could see the wheels spinning in her head. "What about Nick?" she finally said.

"Nick? Nick, the guy I work with?" She was too funny. "Nick who takes ice cream scooping more seriously than anyone ever should? Nick who almost had a nervous breakdown when the chocolate and rainbow sprinkles accidentally got mixed together? That Nick?"

"He has a good work ethic," she countered. "And he's cute."  
"Hello, I'm not thirty. I don't want a good work ethic yet. I just want someone who can form complete sentences."  
"Which he totally did! I've heard him! He says, 'Hello, how can I help you today at the Scooper Dooper?' It doesn't get much more complete than that, Miley." She paused. "And he's cute."  
"He's a smidge of cute." I acknowledged after a minute.  
"No, Mils, he's _cute_. One hundred percent cute."  
"If he's so cute, then why don't _you_ make out with him on Monday morning?"

"Because, as I've pointed out, I'm already with the best guy in the world."  
I laughed through my nose. "That's fabulous news for the rest of us."


	3. Gleeathon!

Three hours later, Lilly had a sorta-kinda Mohawk that she proclaimed her best hair-do ever; my dad had finished carving the pumpkin with only a small flesh wound; my mom had bought a dozen bags of grossly misnamed "Fun Size" candy bars home; Bendomolena had moved half an inch on the stairs; and I left for work with strict instructions to bring home a pint of Coffee Dream ice cream for my parents. (They seem to be the only ones benefiting from my employee discount, which is just another cruel irony in my life).

The Scooper Dooper was empty. It was the end of October, it was starting to rain outside, and anyone with any sense at all was getting hot chocolate from the foot court upstairs. Nobody wanted a Misty Moroccan Mint in a waffle cone that day. (And between you and me, they shouldn't want it on any day, because it's just plain disgusting).

"I already cleaned out the water wells and reorganized the overstock," Nick said as I clocked in and tied on my apron. He always tucks in his shirt, which makes me a bit nuts.

"And a happy hello to you, too," I said.

"And I think we're low on waffle cones, so I left a note for the manager to reorder some on Monday morning."  
"What a relief."

My sarcasm wasn't registering with him at all. "I _know_," he replied. "You know how customers are about waffle cones."  
"It's one of the great injustices of my life that I _do_ know, Nick." Okay, I even out-bitched myself on that one, I admit it.

It's not that Nick's a bad guy. I mean, he's not at all. He's always polite and nice to little kids after they drop their double scoops on the floor. When the old people come in at five o'clock for their dessert, he always speaks extra loud into their hearing aids. But he's just really quiet and only talks about work at work. I trued to fish around when I first started working here, asking him about movies and books and stuff, but he just stuttered and stammered and finally said, "I think we need more butter pecan."  
What am I supposed to do with that?

It's kind of sad though. I don't think he has any friends. If I didn't work with him, I wouldn't know who he was. He's the kid in the yearbook who everyone sees and says, "Who's that? Does he even go to our school?"

But what can you do, you know? I tried to talk to him and all I got was "butter pecan". There's not a lot to build off of.

So when I work with Nick, I try to pick tasks that play to our strengths. My job is Music Supervisor. He is In Charge Of Everything Else. We're allowed to play the radio here, so I always switch it to KUXV, the college station that plays the good music. We're supposed to keep it on the adult-contemporary station, but I can't work at the Scooper Dooper and listen to Celine Dion at the same time. It's just not gonna happen, I'm sorry. I have my limits.

I flipped the station as soon as I put my hat on, and I could see Nick already getting twitchy about breaking the radio station rules, but he didn't say anything (just like always). Pretty soon I was humming along with the Ramones and "Blitzkrieg-Bop"-ping to the register whenever somebody wanted a room-temperature Coke with a non-bendy straw. These customers are nothing if not picky.

We worked pretty much in silence for the next couple of hours as the sun set outside and the mall got more crowded with couples and families coming out of the movie theatre next door. Judging from the number of guys practicing their karate moves on each other, most of them had seen some kung-fu movie. The DJ on the radio was doing a good job of playing decent music, and Nick and I stayed at opposite ends of the store. A whole gaggle of kids and their parents came in around eight forty-five, fifteen minutes until the mall closed at nine. (It never fails that people will walk in at the last possible minute. I suspect it's a major conspiracy to annoy me). It was a normal Saturday – nothing too exciting, nothing crazy.  
I really miss normal Saturdays.

The kids and their parents were all wearing bright blue T-shirts that said YOUTH CHOIR GLEE-A-THON! on the front, which just goes to show how little parents love their kids, if they're willing to let them wear a shirt like that in public. Nick, who lives for this kind of scooping action, was already reaching for the sugar cones, and I was about to ask the first customer if he wanted a free sample (said with a Scooper Dooper smile, naturally) when I heard my favorite sarcastic DJ talking through the speakers.

"Okay, someone just put this in my hand. It's a new single – we got it on Friday. Local band, the Do-Gooders, blah, blah, blah. Call in and tell me if you hate it. I haven't heard it yet. It's called 'Miley, Wait!'"

The ice cream scoop fell out of hand and hit the floor so hard that the handle broke. I could hear the first chords and even though I heard them strung together once before, I knew the song by heart.

"You said your piece and now I've got to say mine! I had you and you strung me on the _liiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiineeeeeeeeee_!"

When I first heard the song at the Do-Gooders show last summer, I thought that was the worst moment of my life. Wrong-ola. _This_ was the worst moment of my life.

"Straw-berr-ee! Straw-berr-ee!" The kids were starting to chant in a non-gleeful way, completely unaware of the fact that I had gone numb. My Scooper Dooper smile was still plastered on my face and I couldn't force it to go away.

Nick gave me an odd look, handed me the scooper, and said, "Scoop now, think later."  
"But…are you _hearing_ this?" How could he be so calm! It was outrageous. "Do you know what this is?"  
"Um, no. Just scoop now, think later." He repeated, like he was the Dalia Lama of frozen dairy desserts or something. I wondered if he wasn't aware of the whole dramatic situation and was just sharing his personal credo with me. "Hi, sir, how can I help you?" I turned to the first kid in front of me and I could tell I was freaking him out. "What flavor?" I asked through my teethe, even as Jake's words were spilling out of the radio and falling all over me.

"Miley, wait! Miley, wait! Miley, wait!" It sounded as good on the radio as it had that night at the Jukebox. Goddamnit.

"Straw-berr-ee! Straw-berr-ee!" The kids were now singing the words in time to the chorus and I suddenly understood why people sometimes show up to work with a gun and a grudge. "Dad, this song is good!" one of the littlest girls said, her pigtails flying every which way as she clapped her hands.

"It is," her dad agreed.  
"You crucified my heart, took every part, and hung them out to _drrrrrrrryyyyyyy_!"  
"I've heard better." I offered.  
"Excuse me?"  
"Nothing. What size cone, sir?"

Three minutes and forty-nine seconds later, (yes, I counted), the song was over and the Gleeful People were halfway served. I could barely hear the DJ over the noise. "Wow," he was saying. "I gotta tell you, we get a lot of crap here at the station, but this was good. And you're calling in right now, too. I like this. I like this a lot. We're gonna play it again in the next hour, stick around."

So there I was, my ex-boyfriend on the radio, chanting my name like it was an insult; a gaggle of Glee-People in front of me; wearing a hot pink hat that the words Scooper Dooper written across my chest-in-training, with ice cream sticking to my wrists and arms.

My cell phone was ringing in the break room – Lilly's ring. I'd have known it anywhere. Nick kept giving me funny looks and I kept my head down, cheeks on fire, trying to scoop and serve and get everyone the hell out of there.

By the time Nick and I got everyone served and out the door, I was ready to take up smoking and drugs and drinking and whatever vice I could get my hands on without getting arrested. "Oh my God!" I screamed at him, and he took a step backwards. "What was _that_? Did you hear that?!"

"It sounded pretty good." He offered. "That's cool that your name's in a song. My mom's name is Mandy and so everyone asks if that one Barry Mani—"  
"It's not just my name, it's _about_ me!" I shrieked. Two customers who looked ready to enter the store saw me freaking out and turned around to leave. Wise move on their part. "And it's on the radio!"  
"Oh."  
"It's my ex-boyfriend's band and he wrote it about me and it's on the radio and _I'm wearing a Scooper Dooper T-shirt_!"  
"Um, do you think you maybe should sit down?" Nick pointed to the stool by the register. "You look a little upset."  
"I'm a ball of rage right now, Nick," I told him. "Sitting isn't gonna do much."

**Only updating because me & my friend made a pact that if one of us updated, the other one would. And she did, so here's mine.  
:)**


End file.
